Censorship

It’s Time to Curtail the Censorship Industry Cartel

Last month INHOPE, a global trade association of child abuse reporting hotlines, rejected a joint call from Prostasia Foundation, the National Coalition Against Censorship, Article 19, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, that its members should stop treating cartoons as if they were images of child sexual abuse. As our joint letter pointed out, INHOPE's conflation of offensive artwork with actual abuse images has resulted in the misdirection of police resources against artists and fans... more

The Long-Run Effect of Cuba’s Recent Internet-Augmented Protests

It’s now more than 6 weeks since the Cuban political protests and accompanying Internet service disruption. Will they lead to a long-run change in the Cuban Internet or the Cuban political situation? Let’s start with the Cuban Internet. Many of the Internet changes during the protests have disappeared. Total daily traffic, the ratios of mobile to fixed traffic, and human to automated posts, and the proportion of blocked Signal sessions are about what they were before the protests. more

Encryption and Child Sexual Abuse Prevention

Just over one week ago, the New York Times published a major investigation into the intractable problem of illegal sexual images of minors being exchanged online. Despite flaws in the story and its companion pieces, the main take-away that Internet companies have failed to adequately address the problem has resonated widely. Prostasia Foundation too has been critical of some of the Internet platforms called out in the article. But at the same time, we need to be realistic about how much responsibility we can (or should) place on tech firms to solve this problem. more

China’s Draft Rule Targets Domain Name Supervision, Could Limit Access to Foreign Sites

China's government has proposed taking stronger steps towards accessing websites in the country as part of its latest push to set boundaries in the wider Internet. On March 25, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which oversees China's internet and telecommunications sectors, released a public draft regulation outlining rules on domain name registrations. more

Apple Under Fire for Removing VPN Apps from Russia’s App Store

Apple has reportedly removed nearly 60 VPN apps from its Russia App Store, significantly higher than the 25 VPNs acknowledged by Russian authorities, according to a recent report by the App Censorship Project. more

Iran Gives Messaging Apps a Year to Move Data Inside Country

Iran has given foreign messaging apps a year to move data they hold about Iranian users onto servers inside the country, prompting privacy and security concerns on social media. more

Internet Shut Down in Iraq in Response to Mass Protests

The Iraqi government shut down internet access in the country for nearly four hours in response to mass protests in Baghdad. more

Approved: Apple Patent to Allow Disabling iPhone Cams via Infrared Emitters - Censorship Fears Ensue

The patent for a technology to disable iPhone cameras -- filed by Apple in 2009 -- won approval from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office on Tuesday. While logical to counter bootlegging, idea has raised censorship concerns amongst groups such as freedom of expression advocates. more

Russia to Block VPNs in 2024

Russia's communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, intends to block Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) starting March 1, 2024, according to Senator Artem Sheikin of the United Russia party. more

Healthy Domains Initiative Isn’t Healthy for the Internet

We had high hopes that the Domain Name Association's Healthy Domains Initiative (HDI) wouldn't be just another secretive industry deal between rightsholders and domain name intermediaries. Toward that end, we and other civil society organizations worked in good faith on many fronts to make sure HDI protected Internet users as well. Those efforts seem to have failed. more

Internet Companies in Negotiations for Agreement on Code of Conduct in China

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, in negotiations with other Internet companies and human rights organizations, have reached an agreement on a voluntary code of conduct for activities in China and other countries that censor the Internet. The participants are reviewing the agreement for final approval. more

Multi-Stakeholder Internet Governance Is Captured and Presumed Dead

Technical management of the Internet was delegated to ICANN by the U.S. government because it was believed that the private sector would be more agile and responsive to the needs of globally distributed stakeholders. However, this optimism and the faith it has produced has proven to be misplaced since ICANN's multi-stakeholder governance continues falling far short of the basic expectations set when it was created. more

China Starts Coordinated Internet Blackout Ahead of Tiananmen Anniversary

Various sources are reporting that the Chinese authorities have blocked internet access to popular social networking and email sites such as Twitter, Flickr reviews, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail.com and several others. According to the Telegraph, "[T]he measures came as the authorities tried to close all avenues of dissent ahead of Thursday's anniversary, placing prominent critics under house arrest and banning newspaper from making any mention of the pro-democracy protests." This latest co-ordinated internet 'blackout' was initiated at 5 P.M. local time as various websites suddenly became unavailable to Chinese internet users. more

Iran and the Internet: Uneasy Standoff

We've received enough interest about our previous notes on Iranian Internet connectivity that I wanted to give a brief update, and some reflections. In short: Iran is still on the Internet. As the crisis deepens, people are literally risking their lives by continuing to use the Internet for coordination and communication. more

Ukraine Arrests VPN Operator Facilitating Access to Russian Internet

Ukrainian authorities have arrested a 28-year-old man in Khmelnytskyi for running an illicit virtual private network (VPN) service that enabled access to the Russian segment of the internet, known as Runet. more